When The Clash asked the question “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Jennine Capó Crucet had an answer. In How to Leave Hialeah, Crucet’s debut short story collection, characters wrestle with how the places they’re from shape their identity, how to grow beyond them, and why leaving is sometimes the only answer.
Why did I feel such hope when I first heard about David Orr’s new book, Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry? I’ve read my share of poetry guides, and most of them have taken up residence in a particularly dusty neighborhood on my poetry bookshelf. But Orr’s book had a title that pretty much summed up my own weary but hopeful sentiments about contemporary poetry.
Facebook: it’s the bane of every writer’s existence–at least, every writer I know. You sit down at your computer to work. Maybe you even get started on your latest story. Then you need to look something up. You open up your browser. And it calls to you. Come on. Just check me quickly. Don’t you want to know what your friends are up to? What are you waiting for? NEWS IS HAPPENING AND YOU ARE MISSING IT! Yet Facebook can provide huge benefits to writers as well. In the Michigan Quarterly Review, author (and FWR contributor) Preeta Samarasan explains why […]
Last week we featured Everything Beautiful Began After as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Angela Scott (@whimsywriting) Belinda Frisch (@b_frisch) Claire Marie Slight (@clairemslight) To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!
Most writers agree that in order to write, you must also read. Author Allison Winn Scotch raised this point in a recent blog post titled just that: I think being a successful writer means reading your peers and learning from them too – I can’t tell you how much reading authors whom I admire has helped me up my game. Additionally, I think it’s hard to get into a literary state of mind without, well, being literary. And Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan agreed, saying in an interview (via): My advice is so basic. Number one: Read. I feel like it’s […]
This week’s feature is Simon Van Booy’s Everything Beautiful Began After. Published earlier this month by Harper Perrenial, the book is Van Booy’s first novel. He is also the author of two story collections, The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Additionally, he is the editor of three nonfiction philosophy titles: Why We Need Love, Why We Fight, and Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter. Born in London and raised in Wales, Van Booy now lives in New York City, where he teaches at the School […]
Award-winning short story author and bon vivant Simon Van Booy releases his first novel, Everything Beautiful Began After, and proves that his crystalline, poetic prose, showcased in essays and short stories up to now, is also compelling in long-form fiction.
Here’s a great essay by Joyce Carol Oates on the connections between writing and running. Here’s a taster: Living for a sabbatical year with my husband, an English professor, in a corner of Mayfair overlooking Speakers’ Corner, I was so afflicted with homesickness for America, and for Detroit, I ran compulsively; not as a respite for the intensity of writing but as a function of writing. As I ran, I was running in Detroit, envisioning the city’s parks and streets, avenues and expressways, with such eidetic clarity I had only to transcribe them when I returned to our flat, recreating […]
In the conclusion to his season-long exploration of Saul Bellow’s work, Daniel Wallace tackles the sticky problem of Bellow’s endings, what happens to characters over a 50-year career, and how the author’s nonfiction illuminates his talent for storytelling and argument—perhaps even moreso than the novels.
In this two-part essay, Daniel Wallace devotes himself to the work of Saul Bellow for a season. Total immersion in Bellow’s progress as a writer reveals the perplexing philosophical problems at the heart of many of the novels, the difference between early and later books, and the unadulterated beauty of Bellow’s paragraphs.
